So I accidentally triggered an online shitstorm in the process of trying to craft a set of more restrictive LLM usage guidelines for KDE. Sorry about that. :/ I’m going to leave the comments …

Personal opinion: Nathan seems to be really side-stepping a lot of concerns brought of up in the comments there. And referring to people coming together collectively in an open-letter when virtually all other channels are closed as ‘brigading’ is… Not cool. Edit: he retracted the use of brigading.

EDIT 2: Nate has since closed the comments on his blog, and the one discussion thread on KDE Discuss about the AI Policy was closed suddenly without explanation after a KDE developer began to discuss the ethics of AI use. Nate then responded after the thread was closed with this:

  • SigHunter@discuss.tchncs.de
    102·
    4 days ago

    literally the next sentence after the reasons, he calls LLMs “bad stuff”. That does not sound like “equal weight on the scale” to me.

    So yeah, bad stuff. I completely understand why a lot of people have problems with LLMs. I have these concerns as well.

    I agree that the license issue should be enough to not touch anything generated by AI, to not taint the codebase

    • Feyd@programming.dev
      72·
      3 days ago

      Did you stop reading there? Here is your quote + the next paragraph

      So yeah, bad stuff. I completely understand why a lot of people have problems with LLMs. I have these concerns as well.

      I also understand why a lot of experts in their field really like LLMs. These are very powerful and sophisticated tools. Capable people with decades of experience can successfully automate away a lot of tedious work, and still end up with a final product identical to what they would have done by hand.

      I don’t think that conclusion is even accurate and it’s certainly the subject of much debate. He then crunches all of both negative and positive into a 5 bullet list that makes it look much more balanced:

      • Very powerful
      • Genuinely useful for various things
      • Dangerous, de-skilling, and/or addictive in the wrong hands
      • Full of really bad externalities
      • Broadly available worldwide at effectively zero cost

      You’re apparently reading it differently but it looks to me like half the article is trying to funnel into justifying making this a difficult decision after making the case for it really not to be up front. Why do that?